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How My Views on Evolution Evolved

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How My Views on Evolution Evolved How My Views on Evolution Evolved by Richard Sternberg I am an evolutionary biologist with interests in the relation between genes and morphological homologies, and the nature of genomic “information.” I hold a Ph.D. in Biology (Molecular Evolution) from Florida International University and a Ph.D. in Systems Science (Theoretical Biology) from Binghamton University. From 2001- 2007, I served as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Informa- tion and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). I am presently a research scientist at the Biologic Institute, sup- ported by a research fellowship from Discovery Institute; I am also a Research Collaborator at the NMNH. More information about my research and background is available at my website, www.richardsternberg.com. I began my university education in the early meditating on the works of Friedrich Nietszche: 1980s as a committed Darwinian undergraduate His writings appeared prophetic, for not only had who was a strong opponent of young earth crea- he accurately diagnosed in my opinion the disease tionism. As a teenager I was repelled by the strain (the “Last Man syndrome” you could call it) of fundamentalist Christianity that surrounded me whose societal symptoms were (and are) every- in the deep South: the anti-intellectualism, the where to be seen, but he had also foreseen the cultural flatness, and the pessimistic fatalism that major intellectual trends of the twentieth century. seemed then to go with the former two. Equally And then I ran across Richard Dawkins’s The revolting to me was the accommodationism that Selfish Gene and mentally devoured it. By the age I saw in the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, that usually took the form of Liberation By the age of twenty, I was an Theology on the one hand or a bourgeois moral- intellectually fulfilled atheist. ism on the other. Like some of my peers, I was actively searching for an integrated picture of the of twenty, I was an intellectually fulfilled atheist world and I just could not find it in what passed like Dawkins. for Christianity. Having had a lifelong interest in all things Then three eye-opening events occurred that biological—my goal as a child was to become an led me to Darwinism, and immediately thereafter ichthyologist—I decided to pursue a bachelors to an implicit atheism. For one thing, I read Dar- degree in the biological sciences at the University win’s Origin of Species and found myself con- of South Carolina. As an undergraduate I took as vinced—or mostly convinced—that the author many courses having to do with evolutionary the- had made his case. For another, I started ory as I possibly could, and it was there that I HOW MY VIEWS ON EVOLUTION EVOLVED STERNBERG 2 developed to an art a most dangerous habit. I the emergence of new taxonomic groups. It was as would spend hours in the library reading. Not just if Lancelot Law Whyte’s Internal Factors in required materials mind you, but heretical Evolution and Goldschmidt’s and Schindewolf’s volumes; and not just your run-of-the-mill books notions of “hopeful monsters,” had been validated that presented some crankish ideas, but the strong by McClintock’s discovery of “jumping genes.” I plain-brown-wrapper stuff—literature that posed found her ideas to be exciting, to say the least. No hardcore, sophisticated challenges to the Darwin- one else seemed to, though. Professors, maybe in ism that I had so casually imbibed. an attempt to curb my enthusiasm, provided me Day after day, and sometimes night after night when I wasn’t out and about, my attention turned If what Goldschmidt… and many to Richard Goldschmidt’s The Material Basis of others were saying had empirical Evolution and Theoretical Genetics; Hugo de backing, then I had to seriously Vries’s The Mutation Theory and Species and rethink my position with respect Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation; Søren to Darwinian Theory. Løvtrup’s Epigenetics: A Treatise on Theoretical Biology and Darwinism: The Refutation of a with papers wherein hypotheses were proposed Myth; to name only a handful. None of the authors that made any “smart genome” a theoretical im- were creationists and none to my knowledge ever possibility. Copies of the 1980 papers—“Selfish mentioned the G-word, but all were evolutionists genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evo- who were critical of Darwinism and, given their lution” by W. F. Doolittle and C. Sapienza, and backgrounds in genetics and embryology, able to “Selfish DNA: the ultimate parasite” by L. E. outline in detail why the “facts” that I “knew to be Orgel and F. Crick, both back-to-back in true” were either misinterpreted or simply errone- Nature—presented the argument that McClin- ous. Who needed Penthouse? tock’s jumping genes and all the other repetitive Now this self-exposure to the banned DNA along chromosomes, had no function doctrines of Mutationism and Saltationism, whatsoever. Excess DNA, ultimately the Aristogenesis and Orthogenesis, Lamarckism and accidental by-product of replication, could prolif- even Teilhardism, was initially only for the satis- erate by stealth because it has little or no effect on faction of prurient intellectual desires. But like all the workings of the cell. unchecked inordinate leanings, I needed more. The problem with McClintock’s hypothesis of Not for idle curiosity, mind you, but for the a unified genome, so I was told, is the assumption deeper reason that if what Goldschmidt and she made that most of the, say, 98% or so of Schindewolf and Croizat and Lima-de-Faria and human chromosome sequences not belonging to many others were saying had empirical backing, the gene category, are functional and thus have a then I had to seriously rethink my position with phenotypic effect when shuffled around. The respect to Darwinian Theory. evolutionary genetic model of the genome is, in Other factors were also goading me to pursue contrast, basically an aggregate of semi- this line of investigation. The 1980s were a time autonomous, independently segregating, and of upheaval in biology. So many revolutionary “selfish” units arranged like beads on a string. positions were being staked out in that decade— You can rearrange those beads without conse- like pattern cladistics—that I lack the space to quence, and the strings in between are just filler. mention them. Two, however, stand out in terms No integrated system there. So there was of their influence on my thinking. McClintock on one side, and the selfish DNA First, I read Barbara McClintock’s 1983 No- theorists on the other side. I chose McClintock. bel Lecture where she expressed her view that the Throwing academic caution to the wind, I decided genome is a responsive organelle that can be to study the functions of “junk DNA” despite “shocked” into reorganization, thereby leading to being told that it was a futile search. HOW MY VIEWS ON EVOLUTION EVOLVED STERNBERG 3 This brings me to the second event. The 1988 were constantly brought to my attention for reme- Science paper by John Cairns and colleagues on diation: my lack of focus, my reading and think- the evidence for Lamarckian-like directed (non- ing too much, my not applying myself (in the right random) mutations in bacteria made its way into way), and my ceaseless reviewing of data instead my hands. (Remember, I had become a serious of gathering it. True, all manifestly true. It was literature junkie.) What struck me about the article academically a very maladaptive strategy, to was not the case it laid out for internally-oriented borrow a Darwinian phrase. My peers, in contrast, genetic changes; no, it was the controversy that it were single-minded and sanely found the prob- lematica that interested me to be a waste of time. Fortunately, a few friends who were undergradu- ate and graduate students in the Department of Philosophy were only too happy to discuss theo- retical biology with me over beers—they were my enablers. Nonetheless, given today’s standards, I was still far from the slippery slope with respect to evolutionary theory. My views then would have fitted broadly within what is now labeled “self- organization theory.” And I was more than willing to publicly defend evolutionism from various sparked. By all accounts, Cairns et alia were creationist attacks. wrong—really, really wrong. The best that could be said, some asserted, was that some statistical error had crept into the analysis, whereas others FAST forwarding a bit, the early 1990s found pointed out that directed mutations were me in a new state (Florida) and at a different state impossible in principle. For biased and adaptive university (Florida International University), DNA changes raised the spectre of teleology and where I would earn my Ph.D. in biology that, thankfully, had been defeated by Darwin. (molecular evolution) in 1995. My reasons for By the late 1980s, then, and while still at the choosing FIU were numerous: The campus in University of South Carolina, all my mental ener- Miami was (and is) beautiful, it was relatively gies were being consumed by such topics as the close to the ocean, I could combine field and lab functionalities of junk DNA, and directed or (as it research, and I had the explicit go-ahead to study is now termed) adaptive mutation. I also read all my beloved junk DNA. that I could on the nuclear matrix; chromosome While there I compiled enough data from the organization; genetic phenomena such as “trans- literature to convince me that the so-called excess vection,” “position effects,” and “paramutation”; and non-coding sequences in genomes are func- and so forth.
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